Free Speech Under Fire: Trump, Campuses & the UK Crisis
August 25, 2025
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Attorney Greg Lukianoff, the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), has spent his career fighting threats to free speech. FIRE is known for its defense of protected speech on college campuses, where student expression has faced censorship from the left. Now, with President Donald Trump threatening those universities, FIRE has been criticizing First Amendment threats from the right as well. It’s work that’s earned Lukianoff some new fans.
“Some people on the left who always ignored what FIRE did find some of the cases in which we're taking on the Trump administration and give us credit for suddenly being nonpartisan and principled,” Lukianoff told me. “And I’m like, thank you. But I want to say go to hell, because we’ve always been like this; you didn’t like that we were also pointing out left wing authoritarianism, but we certainly find it on the right as well and always have.”
I invited Lukianoff on the show this week to talk about this new landscape of free speech threats. His latest book with Nadine Strossen, The War on Words: Ten Arguments Against Free Speech—and Why They Fail, is a forceful rebuttal to some of the most common critiques of the First Amendment.
I brought up some of these arguments with Lukianoff to understand where he thinks the legal lines lie. While he’s one of the nation’s fiercest defenders of free speech, he doesn’t buy the idea of free speech absolutism.
We talked about why he thinks the cases against Mahmoud Khalil and other visa holders on campus who faced deportation are weak. We talked about why President Trump can’t force Harvard to have more ideologically diverse professors, even if that would be good for the students. And we talked about Europe, where our free speech problems pale in comparison to theirs, with people being arrested daily for saying things the state disapproves of. The threat to free speech has become an international crisis, and Lukianoff is on the front lines of that battle.
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